amely, in
1736, and Colley's comrades bewailed piteously the degenerate times that
were at hand, when a witch was no longer held fit sport for the public,
but was protected and defended like ordinary folk, and let to live on to
work her wicked will unchecked.

But the snake is scotched, not killed. So far are we in advance of the men
of the ruder past, inasmuch as our superstitions, though quite as silly,
are less cruel than theirs, and hurt no one but ourselves. Yet still we
have our wizards and witches lurking round area gates and prowling through
the lanes and yards of the remoter country districts; still we have our
necromancers, who call up the dead from their graves to talk to us more
trivial nonsense than ever they talked while living, and who reconcile us
with earth and humanity by showing us how infinitely inferior are heaven
and spirituality; still we have the unknown mapped out in clear lines
sharp and firm; and still the impossible is asserted as existing, and men
are ready to give their lives in attestation of what contravenes every law
of reason and of nature; still we are not content to watch and wait and
collect and fathom before deciding, but for every new group of facts or
appearances must at once draw up a code of laws and reasons, and prove, to
a mathematical certainty, the properties of a chimera, and the divine life
and beauty--of a lie. Even the mere vulgar belief in witchcraft remains
among the lower classes; as witness the old gentleman who died at Polstead
not so long ago, and who, when a boy, had seen a witch swum in Polstead
Ponds, "and she went over the water like a cork;" who had also watched
another witch feeding her three imps like blackbirds; and who only wanted
five pounds to have seen all the witches in the parish dance on a knoll
together: as witness also the strange letter of the magistrate, in the
'Times' of April 7, 1857; and the stranger trial at Stafford, concerning
the bewitched condition of the Charlesworths, small farmers living at
Rugely, which trial is to be found in the 'Times' of March 28, 1857; the
case reported by the clergyman of East Thorpe, Essex, who had actually to
mount guard against the door of an old Trot accused of witchcraft; while
the instances of silly servant maids, and fortune tellers whose hands are
to be crossed with silver, and the stars propitiated with cast off dresses
and broken meat, are as numerous as ever. And, indeed, so long as
conviction without